


The Salt Sea

by skieswideopen



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 19:50:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skieswideopen/pseuds/skieswideopen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Atlantis can be suffocating for a mage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Salt Sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Themistoklis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Themistoklis/gifts).



> Content Notes:
> 
> 1\. There are some hints of Ronon/Keller here.  
> 2\. There's a short but somewhat graphic description of a serious injury.

Jennifer dreamt of the ocean. Monstrous salt waves heaved and rolled while iridescent fish darted beneath the surface. Below them, broad-winged shadows drifted in a lazy dance that mirrored the white clouds above. Jennifer herself was everywhere and nowhere, alone and not-alone, sea and cloud and scale, the crash of the waves and the sharpness of the wind. And above it all rose a thunderous summons...

She woke with a start, wind and water vanishing abruptly. The noise, however, remained, transformed from the roar of thunder to an insistent static buzz. With a groan, Jennifer sat up and fumbled in the dark for the earpiece on her bedside table.

"Keller."

Doctor Weir's voice cut through the static. "Doctor, I'm sorry to wake you, but you're needed in the gate--" The rest of the message was lost as the earpiece fizzled and died. Jennifer removed it with a grimace and tossed it back on the table. She'd exchange it later. For a moment she debated the relative merits of getting dressed in the dark versus going to the trouble of lighting a lantern, then she sighed and reached for her matches. She was still new enough on Atlantis to want to make a good impression, and she suspected that showing up with her clothes on backward would have a negative effect on that effort. Besides, if it were a military emergency, Ronon might be there.

As she dressed hurriedly, she mentally ran through a list of possible reasons for the call. Probably not a Wraith attack, or else there would have been a more general summons. It could be an accident if one of the night patrols had run into trouble, but they'd called her to the gateroom, which suggested something off-world. Sheppard's team wasn't out in the field, she knew, so...

AR-8, she realized. She'd heard a comment at dinner that they were overdue. It could be she was about to find out why. She grabbed her focus stone and the lantern, and headed out. She exited the mage section just below a run, blinking at the artificial brightness of the corridor. Outside, she paused long enough to pull the door closed behind her and extinguish the lantern. After setting the lantern down, she turned toward the gateroom.

Weir, Sheppard and Ronon were all standing near the gate along with a small group of heavily-armed Marines. An air of anxiety permeated the room. There was no sign of AR-8.

Weir gave her a quick smile as she approached. "Doctor Keller." 

Jennifer smiled back and tried not to flinch at the formality. Her first month on Atlantis, she had barely spoken to any non-mages other than Carson. She'd known before she arrived that some isolation would be inevitable--a natural consequence of not being able to spend more than an hour or so in one place outside of the shielded zones, and then only if it was well away from the really sensitive equipment--but she hadn't expected it to be quite so all-encompassing. She hadn't expected that, two months later, she'd still be on a last-name basis with nearly everyone. 

"What's going on?" she asked, hoping she sounded more professional and less out-of-breath than she felt.

"We received a message from AR-8 not long ago," Weir said, eyes returning to the gate. "Most of the team is pinned under fire, and there's at least one serious injury--Corporal Medina. We sent in an extraction team. We're waiting for them to dial in."

"Wraith?" Jennifer hadn't been through a Wraith attack herself--she'd never even left Atlantis--but she'd seen the aftermath a couple of times, hollow-eyed survivors and orphaned children. She still felt sick at the memory.

Ronon scowled. "Not Wraith."

"Apparently someone said something the locals didn't like," Sheppard said. 

Ronon's scowl deepened. "Teyla had a bad feeling about it."

Weir glanced at him and sighed. "I know. But they have access to resources we desperately need. And we all know that Teyla's gift isn't totally reliable."

"Unless it's about the Wraith," Sheppard said. "She always sees them coming."

"Unless it's about the Wraith," Weir agreed.

"Still, it's too bad she's not here now," Jennifer said. "Maybe she could tell us if--" 

She was cut off by the activation of the gate and the crackling of the radio. Around her, the Marines straightened up and tightened their grips on their guns. 

The radio crackled again, and then a voice came through. "We're coming in hot!"

"Out," Sheppard ordered firmly, looking at Jennifer and Weir. He and Ronon drew their weapons as the Marines took up a defensive formation and prepared to lower the shield.

Jennifer didn't need to be told twice. While Weir headed to the control room, Jennifer retreated to the closest shielded room. The amount of power she was going to need to pull if Medina was as badly injured as Weir had suggested would be enough to fry the DHD if she worked outside of shields.

Inside the tiny room, she lit the wall sconces, then settled in to wait, focus stone clutched tightly in her hand. 

It was always an odd sensation, entering a shielded room. Not so much the mage quarters, which were generously-sized and usually contained at least a handful of other people, but the working rooms scattered throughout Atlantis courtesy of the expedition's engineers. (Jennifer wondered, not for the first time, if the Ancients really hadn't had any mages, or if they'd simply found a way to avoid the clash of magic and technology that constrained Atlantis's present mage company.) If she reached out, she could almost imagine that she sensed the mesh cage that contained her power, preventing it from flowing into the delicate circuitry of the city. Cutting her off from everything.

She jumped when she heard something that sounded like weapons-fire, wishing that she could be with Doctor Weir in the control room, where she'd at least know what was going on. 

The noise cut off abruptly, which Jennifer assumed meant they'd manage to close the gate. She took up position near the door, waiting for her patient. 

She didn't have to wait long. A moment later, the door burst open and two members of the extraction team rolled Medina inside, making the small room feel even more cramped with their gear and the stretcher.

"The gate's closed, ma'am," Lieutenant Johnson said as she hung the IV bag she'd been carrying. "We're secure."

"Thank you," Jennifer said automatically. She gave Medina a quick once-over. He was pale and groaning, but he didn't look to be too badly injured, except for--

A third member of the team squeezed in and set Medina's severed leg on the bed. With a quick nod, Johnson led her team out, leaving Jennifer to work. 

"You'll be fine, Corporal," she assured him as she set his leg against the stump. With one hand on her focus stone and one hand on his leg, she reached out, surfing salt-blood, visualizing the healing. Power ran through her, carrying with it a familiar high, and beneath her hands, flesh and bone mended.

It was nearly dawn by the time Jennifer made it back to the mage section. She'd spent a good chunk of the night working on Medina before handing him off to Carson and his staff for additional transfusions and monitoring for shock and infection. Jennifer didn't think the latter two were likely--it had been a clean healing, and the blood loss hadn't been as bad as it could have been thanks to the team's quick work in getting a tourniquet on--but better safe than sorry.

Inside the door, Jennifer hesitated for a moment, then turned away from her quarters and headed toward one of the balconies. The combination of adrenaline and power meant she wasn't going to be getting any sleep for a while, and she rarely got to see a sunrise on Atlantis.

The balconies were Jennifer's favourite part of Atlantis. The child of a landlocked state, she'd grown up dreaming of water, endless oceans haunting her dreams so frequently that she'd have taken them for a prophetic vision if she had any inclination at all that way. Instead, they had led her demands for visits to the pool and sailing lessons in college, and eventually to this city on the waves. Here she had all the ocean she wanted, with all of the freedom and adventure it suggested. She couldn't touch it, but at least she could look.

The sun was just beginning to peek over the water when Jennifer heard the door behind her open. She turned her head, eyes widening in surprise when she saw who it was.

"Colonel!" she said, overly bright, and winced inwardly at her own eager tone. It was the product of trying to prove that she wasn't the stereotypical stand-offish mage, but she suspected she mostly ended up demonstrating that she'd never quite learned to be comfortable socially around non-mages. It was one of the things she'd hoped would change when she came to Atlantis, the elitism of the mages and suspicion of non-mages both giving way to the small number of people on Atlantis. She'd stepped through the wormhole with visions of group dinners and expedition-wide chess tournaments dancing in her head. She hadn't expected the separation to be worse here rather than better, a division driven by the nature of the city itself.

He didn't seem to notice her tone; just leaned casually against the balcony railing beside her and gave her a quick smile. "Carson says Corporal Medina has you to thank for saving his life."

"I'm glad I could help," she said honestly. She waited for him to leave, the way non-mages usually did, but instead he seemed to settle more firmly into place.

"How are you finding it here?" he asked. 

"It's not exactly what I was expecting," she said. "It's different from home. Or even the SGC." At the SGC she'd at least been able to go out to dinner with her colleagues without worrying about staying too long and breaking something.

"There aren't a lot of mages on Atlantis. It has to be hard."

Hard because the whole city was a technological wonderland, and careful experimentation on Earth had taught them that Ancient tech was just as vulnerable to magical energies as Earth tech--much to the dismay of several high-ranking military personnel who had been hoping to finally be able to combine the two. Hard because it meant spending most of her time in the shielded zones, where the damage she did was limited, and even then having to deal with regular breakdowns in heating and water. There'd been talk of setting up a settlement on the mainland for the mages, to give them somewhere to go where they weren't constantly in danger of breaking things, but so far the idea had been delayed out of concerns for their safety.

"It's an adjustment," Jennifer admitted. She gazed out at the water. "Sometimes I think about going back on the suppressors, so that I could do more." And maybe have some semblance of a social life with people other than her fellow mages. Or take a trip off-world, although she was probably too valuable for that. Of course, she also too valuable to be allowed to take suppressors. Atlantis didn't need another regular doctor; it needed its healer.

Sheppard gave her a surprised look. "You were on the suppressors?"

"I did medical school that way. Regular medical school, I mean. After I finished my healer's training."

"Aren't you a little young to have done both?"

"I was always kind of ahead in school," Jennifer said. "Honestly, the hardest part of medical school was learning how to use a computer to type up my reports." Which was perhaps why she'd never quite fit in with the other mages either.

Sheppard laughed. "Yeah, that must have been a bit of a learning curve." He shifted in place, turning away from the ocean and toward her. "Listen, I know you don't go off-world much, but I was wondering if I could talk you into taking a trip?" As if it were her choice not to leave, rather than a standard policy because powerful mages were too rare to risk. As if she would say no.

But she was sensible anyway. She wouldn't want him to question her stability. "What kind of trip?"

"It's a planet called Xian," Sheppard said. "The court seers have apparently been predicting the death of their current queen. She won't come here, and Xian is pretty magic-heavy, which means our medical tech won't work there, so--" 

"You need a healing mage to go to her." 

"If there's nothing you can do, there's nothing you can do," Sheppard said. "We're not expecting miracles here, and we've told the Xianti the same thing. But they don't have a lot in the way of healing magic, so you might be able to catch something that their doctors can't."

Jennifer thought of all the things that had lured her to Atlantis: purpose, adventure, excitement. The promise of the ocean. "I'll do it," she said.

"Ronon said you would," Sheppard said. He hesitated, looking around as if really seeing the balcony for the first time. "It's kind of small, isn't it?"

"The balcony? I think it's pretty standard."

"The whole mage section," Sheppard said. "I don't come in here much, but...do you guys have anything besides bedrooms in here?"

"There's a common room," Jennifer said. "We have some games. Cards."

Sheppard looked down at his hands on the railing. "I was thinking of maybe asking Rodney to shield the mess hall. So you guys don't have to hurry through your meals so much. You could hang out, maybe."

It was not what she'd been expecting to hear. She suspected her mouth might be hanging open from the shock. "That would be nice," she managed to choke out.

"It was Ronon's suggestion," he said, sounding a little ashamed. "I'll run it by Elizabeth, then add it to Rodney's list." 

"Thank you," she said sincerely. Shared space...and with that view. She wondered if Sheppard played chess. Or if Ronon did. 

"I'll add it to McKay's list for the next downtime," Sheppard said. He took a step back from the railing. "You should get some rest, Doc."

She thought about asking him to call her Jennifer, but by the time she'd summoned the courage, he was already gone.

Maybe she'd ask on their mission. A mission. _Her_ mission. She shivered with excitement and turned back to watch as the sun cleared the horizon. Far below, the ocean glittered in the dawn light.

Maybe she'd have a different dream tonight.


End file.
